


Plant Life

by CrowsAtAPicnic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Albino Karkat Vantas, Bullying, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-13 06:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1215379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrowsAtAPicnic/pseuds/CrowsAtAPicnic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your spirit is sweet, so pull off your sheet,<br/>And give me a ghost of a smile,<br/>Show me your teeth, 'cause you're teddy beneath,<br/>So just grin and bear it a while.<br/>Just grin and bear it a while.<br/>______________<br/>During his free period, Karkat hides away in the school courtyard that nobody knows about, glad to have a space where he can finally let down his guard.  And then John shows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The taste of blood is thick in your mouth when you finally allow yourself to slit your eyes open again. You can hear echoes of their laughter just fading around the corner of the long, deserted hallway, and bitterly you wipe the dribbles of red from your chin and cheek and heave yourself off of the grimy tiled floor. Under normal circumstances, you would have fought back, but they’d jumped you coming out of the locker room, all six of them; they’d circled you like a pack of hungry wolves, flinging phrases like “freak” and “devil boy” and “demon” until they finally pounced to consummate their accusations. Hot tears prick at your eyes, but you refuse to let them leak down your cheeks—that would have to wait until tonight, when new bruises would begin to bloom overtop the ones from a few days ago, and you couldn’t fall asleep because your mind conjured up images of their sneering faces every time you closed your eyes and you knew, you fucking _knew_ , that you would see them again tomorrow.

Your name is Karkat Vantas. You are 16 years old.

You try not to think about how you had to curl into yourself and take it as they kicked you, how you bit your lip so hard to keep from crying out that it split, causing the metallic tang of blood to flood your mouth. They were careful to never draw blood themselves—that might catch too much attention from the people who were supposed to be keeping the students at your shithole high school safe. Nobody looked twice at a few bruises.

With a constricted feeling in your chest, you trudge down the hall to the restroom to clean yourself up, head down so that nobody will see the red. You don’t care about them seeing the blood—hell, it might even be good if someone saw you bleeding, they might try to help you for once. No, you hid the red of your _eyes_ from any potential passers bye, your stupid fucking albino eyes that had condemned you to hell since your first breath of stale school air. One simple mutation, one slip of the genes, and your whole fucking life went down the toilet. 

An acid sneer twists itself onto your face at how a microscopic bundle of genetic slop was responsible for the abuse that stalked in your shadow every day.

The bathroom is empty when you step inside (you had vaguely registered the harsh ringing of the tardy bell as you pulled your knees closer to your chest while they kicked you), but a foggy haze floated around the light fixtures and you recognized this bathroom as the one Gamzee and his stoner friends always smoked in. It was the perfect place to smoke or, say, beat a kid up; no teachers ever bothered with this hallway. 

A quick rinse and a dab of toilet paper on your lip and you were hauling your backpack across your shoulder again, sucking in a breath of slightly fresher air once your were out of the smoky bathroom. It helped calm you minimally, and you set your course towards the very heart of the school, where windowless hallways formed the border of a small courtyard, long forgotten. 

You had your free period now (it was so kind of the assholes to beat you when you wouldn’t be late for a class), and you usually used the blissfully quiet hour to sit in the courtyard and read. The only way into it was a skinny door between the janitor’s closet and an unused classroom-turned-storage, and the rest of the students assumed it was just another utility room. You’d discovered the place when you were, surprise surprise, running from a herd of jocks freshman year and had dodged into the innocuous door before your aggressors had turned the corner. It was some straight up Narnia shit, but it was possibly the best luck you’ve ever had.

The courtyard was really only the size of one of the bigger classrooms, and you had a feeling the builders just put it in there because they couldn’t figure out what to do with the space once they’d blocked it off with all the surrounding hallways. Even so, it was a nice place, if a little rundown; a snaggletooth cobblestone path wove among potted plants and a mossy sundial that had been commandeered by some crawling ivy, and ten or so small trees craned their branches to reach the sunlight that never seemed to fully reach the courtyard floor. Some large pots held what might have been a biology class’s botany unit, but the plants potted there were since choked out by weeds and mosses and ivy, and the pots themselves were cracking where the invaders were particularly aggressive. A rusted old patio set sat expectantly in the center patio, with a crumbling brick next to it which was engraved “Class of 1961”. You figured nobody had stepped into the place since then, and it had a timeless feel to it that made you feel safe. Nobody would jump you while you sat at the flaking wire table and read your trashy dollar store romance novels. The trees didn’t care that you were a freak in the eyes of the other students.

The trees didn’t care that you were about as straight as a Fruitloop, either, but the students didn’t know that yet and you didn’t plan on giving them more ammunition. Letting that delightful little tidbit slip would get you knocked out cold before you could say “rainbow”.

You let yourself sink down into the chair, and today you didn’t even bother pulling out your book. You just pillowed your head on your arms and let out a shaky breath, feeling some tension ease out of your shoulders. You absolutely did not let a tear soak into your sweater sleeve. Nope.

You stayed like that until the muffled sound of the bell jolted you unpleasantly out of your exhausted torpor, nagging you to find your way to back to real life. Always the same. 

Always alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter John.

The moment you hear it, your entire body goes tense and your stomach twists and warning sirens behind blaring in your head, _Danger, danger, someone has seen!_

You look down at your hands and find that you’ve slammed your book shut, fingers still trapped between the pages, and you’re sure that you bruised them but you can’t find it in yourself to feel that right now. Stiffly, you turn around, the rusty metal of the patio chair rasping against the cobblestones beneath it.

Blue.

You turn towards the door, where you’d heard the sudden and jarring slam of a door not a few seconds ago, and the first thing you see is a vivid blue that definitely does not belong in your secret place. 

_Someone has seen, someone’s here, it’s not safe! Danger!_

The blue belongs to the hoodie of a long, lanky boy whose back is pressed against the door that leads into the garden. He’s breathing heavily, his beanie one movement away from sliding off the back of his untamed black hair, his eyes wide behind thick-rimmed rectangular glasses. He’s wearing gray skinny jeans and tattered black Converse, and some small part of your mind offers _scene poser_ in a tiny voice. Very helpful, brain.

Contrary to your reaction, when he notices you he lets out a shaky breath and smiles sheepishly at you. You must look pretty freaked out, because, fuck it all, he almost looks like he’s pitying you. Slowly, he pushes himself away from the door and walks carefully over to you, glancing at the overgrown plants with fascination as he passes them. You hurriedly shove your book into your backpack and stand up, looking around your secret garden for the last time. It’s ruined now. Not safe anymore. You think you might cry.

“Whoa, wait, where are you going?” he says when he sees you stand, voice much too loud. You don’t think words have been spoken out loud in this place for decades, and there he goes with his enormous mouth. After he speaks, the courtyard seems too silent. The fucker scared away all the birds and crickets—hell, he even seems to have made the wind stop. You glare at him.

“Away. Don’t follow me,” you growl, your voice even raspier than usual because you haven’t talked to anyone today. 

“Look, I’m sorry if I interrupted you! But…” he licks his lips nervously, and you notice he has very prominent front teeth—“Um, you might not want to go out there right now.” He laughs shakily. “There’s like, a whole pack of jocks out for my blood. They’ll probably pounce on anything that moves.”

You narrow your eyes. “Jocks? Were they all wearing wrestling jerseys?”

His eyes widen, and unwillingly you notice that they’re impossibly blue. Even brighter than his hoodie, how the fuck is that even possible? “Yeah! Are you—um, are they your friends?”

A sardonic laugh bursts out of your throat before you can stop it. “Dude, I’m a fucking albino. You honestly think they would hang out with the demon kid?”

He visibly relaxes, takes a step closer. You tighten your grip on your bag.

“Guess not. They weren’t very welcoming to the new kid, either.” No wonder you don’t recognize him. “I just moved from Washington,” he offers.

“The answer to a question I never asked,” you shoot back, and instantly regret it because holy fuck, he looks like a kicked puppy as soon as the words are out of your mouth, the grin that seemed almost ready to break out on his face falling into a betrayed downward curve and his shoulders drooping.

"Oh," he says in a small voice, eyes dropping down to look at his nervously shuffling feet.

“Oh fuck, don’t fucking look at me like that, Jesus. I’m sorry, okay? I’m just…not used to people talking to me. What’s your name?” Past Karkat is the biggest idiot. It is him.

He brightens marginally, then offers you his hand. “John Egbert. What’s yours?”

“Karkat Vantas. Fucking weird name, long story, blah blah blah, I know.” You frown, realizing that you’ve initiated a conversation with this kid and now you can’t just walk away. Besides, he’s a new kid who obviously can’t leave the courtyard yet, and truth be told you’d rather not either if there's hungry assholes lurking on the other side of the door. The sanctity is already shattered, anyway—what more harm could possibly be done by stomping on the shards?

“That’s a cool name!” John chirps, then lets his bag fall to the ground and sits in the chair you’d left pulled away from the table.

You sigh.

You sit down across from him.

“What are you doing?” you ask sharply as he reaches into his bag and starts rummaging around. You still don’t trust this John kid, even with his disarming smile and beautiful eyes and his dumb legs that go on for miles.  
Wait, what?

“It’s just that I have some cake left over from lunch. Back in Washington, Jade would always eat it, but now she’s not here and I hate cake but my dad always manages to slip it into my lunch, and you look pretty skinny so I didn’t know if you might—“

You hold up a hand to silence him and pinch between your eyes with your other. God, he talks so _much_. The only person you've heard talk so much is Kankri, and he went away to college three years ago so you'd grown accustomed to only hearing the rants in your own head since then. John's babbling felt foreign to your ears. “Are you offering me cake,” you deadpan after a few beats of silence. John beams at you.

“It’s red velvet, but my dad says cream cheese icing is a confectionery sin so it just has normal sugar icing.” He produces a small Tupperware and a plastic fork and pushes them across the table towards you. You stare at him, unable to wrap you mind around this kid. He burst into your fucking garden and killed every bit of silence until it was dead twice over, he doesn’t care that you’re albino, and now he’s produced cake and is offering it to you.

You take the cake.

It’s delicious.

“Holy shit, how do you not like cake,” you mumble around the fork, staring down at the slice with wide eyes. Damn your incurable sweet tooth. It’s a weakness you’ve been trying to overcome for years, but then something like this always comes along and ruins it for you, although nothing has ever tasted quite this good. Jesus.

John laughs, and the sound is clear and full and it makes your heart do an utterly uncalled-for palpitation. The tiny voice in the back of your head decides to chime in again, whispering _And he’s cute as hell, too_.

“I’ll bring you more tomorrow,” he says, then pulls out a notebook. “Do you mind if I do some homework here? It’s my free period and it’s pretty nice out here, and I don’t think the jocks even know this place exists.”

You grunt and John smiles at you gratefully, then turns his attention to his work. You finish the cake while staring at him, noticing the way he adjusts his beanie and how his stupid thick eyelashes flutter as he reads over what he just wrote and how he chews his bottom lip before writing down another few words. When every crumb is successfully in your belly, you slide the Tupperware back to John and slowly take out your book. Somehow, you’re able to get absorbed back into the plot, when you usually can’t even take out books like this in front of anyone else. 

The birds have been back to chirping for a while now, and not far from the table a cricket chimes in repeatedly. It’s nice.

Fuck everything. Fuck it to hell and back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy this is going to be where I take out all my fluffy needs while drama happens in tAatS. Prepare your bodies.
> 
> P.S. Headcanon John in this fic is heavily influenced by JumpingJackFlash's Hurricane, aka one of my my favorite fics ever

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by the song "Plant Life" by Owl City and a wonderful picture by tumblr user atomictictacs!  
> Picture: http://atomictictacs.tumblr.com/post/76315598850/id-rather-waltz-than-just-walk-through-the-forest
> 
> does this mean that I have two multi-chapter fics going at once  
> it does 
> 
> ...shit.
> 
> ((Changed from DaveKat to JohnKat because of reasons))


End file.
